Saturday morning I got up bright and early and picked up my knitting mom and we headed off to catch the train (the knitting train, no less - seriously, they had a special car just for the yarn-addicted) and head down to the Santa Clara Convention Center for Stitches West 2006. More on that is posted here. I bought yarn (big surprise), I did a lot of knitting on the train (again, big surprise), we got a little lost on the way home from the train station (the navigator got her directions backwards), and it was a very long day, but we had a marvelous time.

Yesterday morning, despite having gotten home quite late and being very tired and really wishing I could have just stayed home to sleep instead, we went to church because the recorder group was playing and as leader I sort of had to be there. Due to various scheduling conflicts all my alto players couldn't come, and that left me with only sopranos and tenors, and since we were playing a song in the round, and we could scrounge up enough soprano instruments for everyone but not enough tenors, everyone ended up on the same instrument and it all worked out quite lovely. Also we had to go to church despite preferring to stay home and sleep because Richard's still teaching the Sunday School class on the Da Vinci Code. I finished the book, by the way, and my impression of it did not improve by the time I was done. Maybe it would be better if I was a repressed fundamentalist who was raised to never question what my preacher done taught me, so the 'revalation' at the end of the book would have been so shocking I could have overlooked the hackneyed plot, the gaping loopholes, the overuse of cliches, and the random piles of 'look what we dredged up from Conspiracy-Theories-Are-Us', but alas, that was not the case.

Richard headed off to DundraCon for the rest of the day so that left me with time to work on my Knitting Olympics project, and then to go to my third-Sunday-of-the-month knitting group (look, we have a website now). Those of us who went to Stitches West babbled excitedly about our trip and did our best to make the rest of them wish they'd gone too, and there was a little bit of show and tell of our various purchases, and there was drinking of coffee and eating of pastries - two things which I have decided should always accompany large groups of women who have come together for the sole purpose of knitting, but I digress. Afterwards I came back home and kept on working on the Olympics project and then finally when I was starting to fall asleep over my needles, I went to bed.

Today I tried very hard to sleep in a little bit but the cats weren't the slightest bit interested in cooperating, and it was just as well, because we had to get up and head off to Napa for my older's sister's birthday. We wrapped up the really cool pop-up books about silly dinosaurs and silly sharks for my youngest nephew, whose birthday was last weekend, and the present for my sister, and then we headed off to my sister's house, where we arrived just as they were finishing up the latest dog training session. They adoped a dog a few weeks ago and because she tends to be a little tense around other dogs, they've got a trainer who comes to their house and works with all of them there. It seems to be working out quite well, and the dog is just an absolutely sweetheart and so very happy to have a family of her own. The boys, naturally, adore her, especially the youngest, since unlike the cats, the dog actually doesn't mind when he wants to give her a great big hug.

Mom and Dad had to leave shortly after lunch because my dad had to catch a plane, but Richard and I stayed a little bit longer, to eat birthday cake and chat. And then we came home and we both took naps because it has been a very long weekend, and now I am back to my knitting and I have passed the halfway point on this shawl with just one week to go and as much as I know how much I will like this thing when it is done, I have reached the point where I wouldn't mind if it would just hurry up and finish itself instead.